Most companies claim that they are customer-centric businesses, which is a good thing since prioritizing delivering a high-quality customer experience as one of the top goals shows significant revenue generate. Research shows that “value chains are being reshaped—redistributing more than US$3 trillion to businesses that best anticipate the impacts”. CMOs and CIOs, therefore, are carefully analyzing their customer behavior and expectations to gain an edge in today’s competitive market.
However, not all businesses understand their customer behaviors and patterns; therefore, in the IT outsourcing industry exclusively, it is essential that the software development team is put to walk in the customer’s shoes.
Why having an insider’s point of view is important for product development?
Product owners and UX designers usually focus on solving customer problems, but without the insider’s point of view, there is a high chance that the team cannot fully tackle the problem.
Of course, there are some actions we can take to improve the workflow, such as compartmentalizing the product development process. Nevertheless, the most effective way to create the opportunity for the software development team is to have their customer’s perspectives to know what they need. This helps build better software solutions and helps to increase the customer engagement and software development team’s productivity in the long run.
Many product owners are fully aware of this; they and their software developers are constantly trying to gain their point of view. But the problem lies in the source of information: it’s usually secondhand.
So, it is strongly recommended that the team at software development outsourcing companies get out of their computer screen and start putting on the customer’s shoes to experience and know exactly what the customers are facing.
This is truly an extra step in the already aggressive roadmap; even so, here are a few reasons why you should consider letting your staff walk in customers’ shoes.
To encourage an effective working team
You can significantly improve the team’s efficiency by simply letting them know the purpose of what they’re doing, which will ultimately motivate them.
No one likes working without seeing the value they’re creating. So, it is critical to slow down and make sure all team members understand what problem they are solving.
For software development projects like financial-related one, the engineering team often get frustrated since each new feature associates with new details. The team might catch themselves hung up on the requirements since they too focus on the technical aspect and forget about the project’s real purpose: to solve customers’ problems.
You can set up meetings between your software engineering teams and customers so that both sides know what the other is doing and raise any questions they have. By better understanding the problems they are working on, the team will be motivated, reinvigorated and surely, excited to work on the new features again.
To create better solutions
Besides mental improvements, by allowing your software engineering team to understand the customer’s experience, thought process, and challenges, the team will be motivated to create better software solutions.
Because software developers have whole different skill sets when approaching problems. When they’re opened up to see the full panoramic view, their ability to use the technological capability to solve problems will surely meet customers’ needs.
For instance, you and your software development outsourcing team are working with a fast-food restaurant. The requirement is to build a custom mobile application that helps solve communication inefficiencies among restaurant GM and the service teams. Your software developers have to develop a tool that streamlined and manual processes while allowing real-time communication.
To help the team create a better mobile application, you can let the software development team experience what the GM and the service team are going through. If you’ve ever been in the restaurant’s kitchen, you will know how intense it can be.
The experience can give the team a passion for developing a solution fitted the working pace and intensity that the restaurant people have to deal with.
A true customer-driven approach
Without a proper understanding of what the customer’s dealing with, no matter how high the software developers get paid, they will still lack the motivation to work together and untangle whatever the core of problems they’re working on.
By simply giving your software development outsourcing team an answer to the question of why they have to work on certain things, you can truly create a customer-centric business where solving customers’ problems is your priority.
Via tpptechnology
